'We were awful': Pink Floyd's Waters on band's early days

Former Pink Floyd co-founder and bass guitarist Roger Waters performs with a Romanian children choir during "The Wall" tour live concert in Bucharest August 28, 2013. REUTERS/Radu Sigheti

LONDON (Reuters) - Pink Floyd founding members Roger Waters and Nick Mason joked while unveiling a memorial plaque on Thursday that they were so bad at first that they wouldn’t have passed an audition on a talent show.

The pair, together with the late Richard Wright, formed the group while studying architecture at the former Regent Street Polytechnic in central London between 1962 and 1965. The psychedelic and progressive rock band went on to become one of the most commercially successful groups in popular music.

Returning to the site of the polytechnic to unveil the plaque, they talked about their time as students and about the early days of Pink Floyd.

Asked how good the group was when it started out, drummer Mason said: “Put it like this: if we’d gone up for ‘Britain’s Got Talent’, I don’t think we would have made it past the audition stage. We weren’t terribly good.”

“We were effing awful,” added Waters, Pink Floyd’s bassist and the band’s main lyricist during their peak years.

Pink Floyd, which racked up record sales exceeding 250 million, had an initial line-up that included guitarist and songwriter Syd Barrett, another student, who left in 1968. Lead guitarist David Gilmour became the fifth member in late 1967.